Lena Grip: Socio-spatial relations in digital times: performance of ethnicity in immigrant entrepreneurship
In this study performance theory is used to investigate how ethnic identities are practiced and digitally performed in immigrant entrepreneurship, and to examine how immigrant businesses are marketed as part of the contestation, confirmation and elaboration of ethnicities. We are particularly interested in the potential role of the characteristics or attributes of the digital artifacts of foodscapes in the shaping and reshaping the structural boundaries of the novel opportunities that entrepreneurs can form and enact to perform ethnicity in digital immigrant entrepreneurship.
The presentation builds on a recently published paper on digital media use in immigrant entrepreneurship, which aims to increase knowledge of (1) how immigrant-owned businesses digitally promote and market their non-majority ethnicities to their advantage and (2) how ethnicity
is used and digitally performed by immigrant businesses. For this, we examine the social media use of seven successful Vietnamese restaurants in Sweden.
The study propose two concepts: “performing digital ethnicity” and “digital ethnicity affordances.” The former describes the use of digitalisation to attract potential customers by fusionising home and host cultures through three digital performances: preserving, embracing and appropriating. The latter illuminates the capability of immigrant businesses to utilise digital artifacts, platforms and infrastructure to construct digital ethnicity, representing different degrees of attachment to both home and host countries in offline and online spaces through boundary stretching, boundary bridging and boundary bonding.
Reeta Pöyhtäri and Päivi Pirkkalainen: Encounters between asylum seekers and locals in a small rural municipality and media: The hopeful case of Kyyjärvi
In our presentation, based on interview (N=17) and media data, we analyse strange encounters (Ahmed 2000) between locals and asylum seekers in Kyyjärvi – a small rural municipality in Finland. In 2015, Kyyjärvi received for the first time ever asylum seekers and became represented in the news media as an exceptionally hospitable place in times of increasing hostility towards asylum seekers and restrictions to the state asylum policies. After initial fears that had been fed by social media discussions and rumors, encounters on the local level and integration of asylum seekers in the local job market led to mutual friendships and transformed locals’ perceptions on both asylum seeking and immigration policies, resulting in strong support for the asylum seekers paired with institutional distrust. Media framed these encounters from the locals’ point of view and critiqued immigration policies by depicting a story of a welcoming municipality, in which asylum seekers were integrated and found employment. In this case, Kyyjärvi was represented as a site of hope and as a national example of successful integration, while the arrival of the asylum seekers was experienced as mutually beneficial. Symbolically the case and its’ media representation also served to the national self-image of Finland as a hospitable country. Such representation was much needed to balance the otherwise negative public debate on asylum seeking. Through longitudinal analysis of local experiences and news media material, this case study also enlightens the potentiality of rural places to welcome refugees. In the end, however, this potential depends on wider structures, such as immigration and regional policies, that define the actual conditions for long-term hospitality. Despite of a hopeful start, these conditions have made the asylum seekers leave Kyyjärvi only some years after their arrival.
Tuire Liimatainen: The Finnish diaspora policy and the reimagining of a community in the digital age
The world has become increasingly connected with the help of digital media and rapidly developing digital technologies. Alongside the more commonly studied transnational media practices of migrants, digital tools have also been increasingly used by states to engage, enable and empower diasporas, making diasporas important actors in the political, economic and social development in countries of origin. This development invites us to consider the state-diaspora relations and the influence of digitalization in the processes of nation-building in detail. As part of a broader research project “Digital Diasporas of Expatriate Finns – Identity, Belonging and Nationhood in a Networked Era” (Kone Foundation, 2023-2026), this paper presents a preliminary analysis of the ways in which digitalization has been visioned as affecting the relationship between the Finnish state and Finnish diaspora communities in Finnish diaspora policy. Based on an analysis of the Finnish government’s policy programs for expatriate Finns and documents from the Finnish Expatriate Parliament from this millennium, the study considers the digital age as a particularly important juncture in the historical development of the relationship between the Finnish state and Finnish diaspora communities as well as in the ways in which the Finnish nation is imagined. The study contributes to existing body of work on state-diaspora relations by taking digitalization instead of policy-oriented perspectives as the point of departure.
Hedwig Wagner: Digital cross border regions. A geomedia and border studies approach
In our research project ‘Mobile media and location-based data in a cross-border context’we were interested in the cross-border space as a ‘readable space’ (Wilken Goggin 2015, 11). The research project aimed at to shed light on the relationship between physical lived space and digital lived space (the representation of real space in a digital geo-media with interactive capacity) in a cross-border region. This proposed contribution (results from the research report on the project) is anchored in border studies and provides a first typology of the uses of geomedia in a transborder region. Our study focused on the traces that people leave in digital space on both sides of the north-eastern border of France, specifically on the geolocation habits of people who regularly cross national borders, their exchanges via social networks, and the narration of their lives.